Sorry. Wanted to be funny in my first post, but when I started writing i just couldn’t find any humor in the subject. Apologies, too, if i seem to wander a bit, but there’s a point in here somewhere.
No curse intended, but we live in interesting times. As a recently retired scientist, I’m kind of gobsmacked by the disconnect between what we seem to want as a society writ large and what we actually do as individuals within society. The key to bright futures for our kids and our country seems to be STEM education. All the STEM teachers and STEM professionals say so. Good jobs for our kids, technological (and therefore business and military) superiority for the nation. Other countries are also embracing science and technology. And for the same reasons. Not just our allies and fellow travelers, either. Win/win, right? And yet… I worked at a small Office at NIH and perhaps saw a bit more of what the ignoramuses (igmorami?) had in store for Anthony Fauci. Why would anyone choose a career path leading to that?
Alas, a major political party and its minions in our country is rallying around stupidity as a philosophy and as an approach to increased power. Denying the existence of evidence, data, facts, in service to ‘beliefs’ and ‘feelings’ (all from the anti-woke crowd).
One can find pretty decent STEM content for homeschooling on the web. But how does a homeschooling parent of certain religious and/or political persuasions reconcile the existence of objective reality with their theological and political preferences? I’m going to go out on a limb here and hypothesize that they don’t. Math, chemistry, and physics? Probably safe (except, perhaps for the origin of the universe, the big bang sounds kinda dirty). Biology (especially developmental biology, evolution, the science of sexuality, immunology, public health) may be subject to a little theologically inspired parental discretion. How does one reconcile intentional pig ignorance with our hopes for our kids and our future?
Forget inflation, employment statistics, wage growth, infrastructure, consumer confidence. In answering the question of whether or not we were better off four years ago than we are now, we only have to recall the overflowing hospitals, refrigerator truck morgues (https://www.cnn.com/2021/05/07/us/new-york-coronavirus-victims-refrigerated-trucks/index.html), 400,000 preventable COVID deaths, poor performance of the U.S. in handling the pandemic compared to the rest of the developed world, to realize that as a nation, our leaders of the time chose science and fact denying as a political strategy to make themselves look better in hopes of retaining their political power. It didn’t work last time. Let’s make sure the lies and alternative facts don’t work this time, either. STEM, anyone?